Bochs 2.2.1 has been released on July 8, 2005. You can download it from the Source Forge project page. See the CHANGES file for details on what has changed since version 2.2.
Bochs 2.2.1 has been released on July 8, 2005. You can download it from the Source Forge project page. See the CHANGES file for details on what has changed since version 2.2.
The first link kicks back an osnews 404 page.
I’ve tried both qemu and bochs. They are similiar, but qemu seems much faster. What are the advantages of bochs?
thanks for pointing it out, i forgot to include “http://“ in the hyperlink.
The “Bochs 2.2.1” link in the article is broken.
Is Bochs back in active development? Has much happened since Kevin Lawton left to start plex86?
Kevin Lawton never seemed like a real Open Source advocate to me. First he releases Bochs, but tells people they have to pay up if they want it released under an Open Source license. Finally Mandrake ponies up.
Nothing wrong with an alternative OSS funding model, but something about that approach doesn’t exhibit a real Open Source spirit.
Then he unilaterally announces that he is changing the plex86 license from LGPL to MIT because of “commercial and non-commerical inputs”. Sounds like he wants to close-source it again and go commercial.
http://savannah.nongnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1914
The legality of that is pretty questionable unless he got formal copyright transfers from all contributors, and ethically it is even more questionable if outsiders spent hours of their lives tracking bugs and improvements with the implicit assumption that it was for a community project.
Seven months (and no released plex development) later, he starts asking for donations on Sourceforge, having failed in gaining commercial funding:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=338793
It’s just an interesting history. Certainly, it didn’t work out very well. If Kevin had fully embraced the community and his projects for their own sake, and followed the now-classic “Paid Support, Paid new features” avenue, it seems he might be a big success?
What does the OSNews community think of this approach? Or are my impressions all wrong?
What does the OSNews community think of this approach? Or are my impressions all wrong?
I don’t know about “the community”, but I think you’re wrong.
Then he unilaterally announces that he is changing the plex86 license from LGPL to MIT because of “commercial and non-commerical inputs”. Sounds like he wants to close-source it again and go commercial.
Yeah, as copyright holder he can do that and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. What exactly wrong with MIT again? It’s more free than LGPL.
The legality of that is pretty questionable unless he got formal copyright transfers from all contributors, and ethically it is even more questionable if outsiders spent hours of their lives tracking bugs and improvements with the implicit assumption that it was for a community project.
Legally, yes it would seem he would need all copyright assignment or agreement from all contributors.
Seven months (and no released plex development) later, he starts asking for donations on Sourceforge, having failed in gaining commercial funding:
He wants to be paid to program. Oh, the shame (end sarcasm)
t’s just an interesting history. Certainly, it didn’t work out very well. If Kevin had fully embraced the community and his projects for their own sake, and followed the now-classic “Paid Support, Paid new features” avenue, it seems he might be a big success?
That’s just your ideology hoping that model would have worked out for him. Bottom line is that programmers want to get paid to do what they love and I question your morals in you having a problem doing with what he wants with his code.
All I’m saying is there is a story here that we might be able to learn from. Of course Lawton needs to be paid; everyone needs to be paid. The sort of “hesitatingly open source” approach he used didn’t seem to work in the end. But I also don’t know the details of his deal with Mandrake so maybe it actually did work for him; does anyone know?
But compare Bochs to, say, Wine and Code Weavers. Wine embraced and leveraged a community around it, and the key developers found a business model that worked well and are happily making money at Code Weavers. Lawton with Bochs and Plex86 kept the public at arms length, and failed to turn it into a viable emulator or business.
You’re definately right, if he converted the license on code others own the copyright to, that is copyright infringement, and his rights to redistribute the code in question terminate as per clause 8 of the LGPL.
What are the advantages of bochs?
Much better machine level debugging for one. They take different approaches as well. Bochs works by emulating a full machine, with code running on the virtual machine. Qemu (AFAIK) interprets code to a suitable form, then runs on the native machine. End result is that Qemu is much, much faster at running code, but Bochs (IMHO) is far more useful for development purposes.
Does bochs support AMD 64bit emulation? From the change list, it seems it does, but when i try to boot a 64-bit OS in bochs, the OS complains no 64-bit support. Do i need a 64 bit OS to run Bochs for it to support 64-bit emulation?
Bochs support 64bit emulation, but the emulator must be compiled with the support (./confugre –enable-x86-64). You don’t need 64bit machine to run it.
I don’t think you can really sell many services around an emulator like bochs, especially when for “production” use, like running several servers on one machine there are faster options like Xen.
Bochs is a good aid for developing an operating system, but that market is small for selling services …
Being paid to add features might help a bit more, but which hobby os programmer would pay? And then there would probably be a few companies left.